Hardware vs Software Video & Battery Life

[calverson]

I recently read on the iPad VLC forum that the hardware video playback is locked to developers, and that is why VLC cannot play HD video content as well as the native Videos.app.

I am assuming, then, that videos played through the Video.app would drain less power on the system resources than using VLC or CineXPlayer or another 3rd-party video application. Therefore, for maximum battery life, having natively encoded videos being played through the native video player would be better than using VLC or some other solution.

Are my assumptions correct? Does anyone have any information on this theory?

Calvin

 

[calverson]

I guess that nobody knows...

 

[FatalDesain]

this forum is for simple questions, good luck finding an answer here.

 

[dupont2005]

I never watched an entire movie with VLC. Everything works fine for about ten minutes, then it starts acting crazy. Glitching, crashing, and so on. So I decided I'll just convert my movies and watch them that way. So far so good. I have watched two movies that way without a hitch. As far as battery life I wouldn't know. I gave up on VLC after about 15 minutes worth of non stop viewing.

 

[NumbLock]

It is because VLC is a software decoder when not using the formats that the iPad hardware (and iOS Hardware in general) is optimized for.

In reality, I didn't really have luck using it.

 

[NumbLock]

this forum is for simple questions, good luck finding an answer here.

Switch to decaf.

 

[calverson]

Yeah, I think that I might. The reason that I think that VLC or any other third party app uses more battery is because of the software decoding, whereas I have a feeling that the hardware decoding is more efficient and easier on the system.

Tks anyway.